OT That 'sizzle sound' of Mp3s

[Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>]

Young People Prefer "Sizzle Sounds" of MP3 Format:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/11/153205

"Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, tests his incoming
students each year by having them listen to a variety of recordings which
use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality, and he
reports that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. 

Berger says that young people seemed to prefer 'sizzle sounds' that MP3s 
bring to
music because it is a sound they are familiar with. 

'The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I 
first did this I was
expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see
MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a
proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC),' writes Berger. 'To my
surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the
experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 - particularly in
music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.'

Dale Dougherty writes that the context of the music changes our perception
of the sound, particularly when it's so obviously and immediately shared by
others. 'All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us.
It's mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking
back might find curious because these preferences won't be obvious to
them.'"